A CEO sent me a technology proposal
A CEO sent me a technology proposal. These are the first three things I ignored.
The feature list. Forty bullet points, every one of them true, none of them telling me whether the business needs the thing. Features are what the vendor is proud of. They are not evidence.
The buzzwords. AI-powered, cloud-native, scalable, seamless. Each one is a word that costs nothing to type and cannot be checked. I read past them the way you read past "great location" in a property listing.
The architecture diagram. It was beautiful. Boxes, arrows, three tiers. Diagrams are drawn to look sound, and a CEO cannot tell a good one from a bad one, so its only function in the document is reassurance.
What I looked for instead was smaller and duller.
Which existing system this has to talk to, and whether the vendor has done that integration before, at a company that would take my call.
What the proposal assumes about the CEO's data, and who is going to clean it.
The name of the person inside the company who owns this in month six.
What happens to the price when the scope changes, in the vendor's own words.
And the sentence about what the business does differently once this is live. It was not in the document. It is usually not. That absence was the review.